Please join us for a power-trio as we celebrate the publication of Anna Moschovakis’s new novel with special guests Stacy Skolnik and Claire deVoogd

Anna Moschovakis: An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth : A Novel (Soft Skull)

A formidable, uncanny, and utterly unique new work from accomplished novelist and poet, Anna Moschovakis, whose translation of David Diop’s Frêre d’âme (At Night All Blood Is Black) won the 2021 International Booker Prize

After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world.

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS is a poet and translator whose most recent novel is Participation (2022, Coffee House Press). Other books include the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, and poetry books They, We Will Get Into Trouble for This and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has also translated Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, and various others. She is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-founder of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY.

Stacy Skolnik: The Ginny Suite (Montez Press)

'Information didn’t need to be remembered; it remembered her…'

A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.

The Ginny Suite is formally innovative, a great read. Stacy Skolnik recasts the subject of the internet into telling particulars in her affecting choreography of memes/screens/women/men.
— Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love

The Ginny Suite is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Anyone who’s ever suffered the malady of writing poems will recognise The Ginny Suite’s inability to stop picking these scabs. Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies—like if the author of Malina had a dormant Neopets account. I adored it.
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug

Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chapbook Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade for Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). She is a co-founder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform. The Ginny Suite is her debut novel.

Claire deVoogd: Via (Winter Editions)

Poet Claire DeVoogd’s first book explores what happens to speech, history, and the future when approached from an imagined position after ending—after after—charting a path from an unreal “before” to modernity.

Claire DeVoogd has a capacious mind. Her poetry has the commotion of history’s frantic details and grand movements, and a metaphysical silence that is post-apocalyptic. Via is a road for visionary readers.
—Robert Glück

“A passionate eulogy for life on this earth, Via represents an Errand into the wilderness of our contemporary era. DeVoogd’s poetry and prose is in correspondence with the twelfth-century poet Marie de France whose chivalric Lais offer a cartography through our collective consciousness in these apocalyptic times via the “undertow and marvel” of language and history. “Words extend around worlds” and we go on.”
—Susan Howe

“There’s a remarkable agility in Claire DeVoogd’s poetry, a tension from line to line and image to image that is wickedly smart and wickedly spooky. Somewhere between “a cathedral of every pink” and “a moss so green it bleeds real blood” she conjures old souls into new bodies and fleshes out the hope that lurks in apocalyptic dreams.”
—Lisa Jarnot

“Near the end of Via, Claire DeVoogd writes of her interest in the ways worlds extend around words. When I read that I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. Actually, I’d already been struck by lightning a million times while reading Via, and DeVoogd’s worlds/words extension just crystallized that experience. Via is the closest experience I’ve ever had to time-traveling via poems, with Claire’s addresses to Marie de France leading us to Paradiso as Apocalypse and/or vice versa. The thing is, this book is insanely pleasurable. A scroll of refusals in hyper-inclusive stacks of couplets? Check. The sense of maybe seeing every painting everywhere all at once? Check. Total formal command in informal service of exhausted expansion? Yeah. I love this book so much.”
—Anselm Berrigan

Claire DeVoogd is a poet and teacher in New York City. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She is the author of a chaplet Apocalypses 1-12 (Belladonna*, 2021). Other recent work can be found on Montez Press Radio, in Prelude, The Brooklyn Rail, Pfiel, and elsewhere. She co-edits Terrific Books, a pamphlet press.